Tiago Sousa

Samsara

Portuguese composer and pianist Tiago Sousa follows his 2011 album Walden Pond’s Monk with his first solo piano record: Samsara. While Walden Pond’s Monk featured Sousa on piano accompanied by clarinet and percussion players, Samsara allows the playing of Sousa to take center stage. Samsara is an intricate record, built on a complex narrative that’s anchored on this oriental philosophical concept - a bold and emotive piece that stands through its carefully managed balance between opposites.
Samsara is, for several oriental cultural manifestations, the repetitive and re-occurring cycle of life, death and rebirth; it stands for a continuous drift through the various modes of existence. For Sousa, then, Samsara works as a metaphor for the flux of human creativity and how it influences our perception of reality while at the same time positing new challenges and difficulties.
Since his first release, in 2006, Tiago Sousa has been consistently developing his very own aesthetics; through his relatively large body of work, we can identify an artist on the search for his own expression and identity. Samsara follows two largely successful endeavors, both centered on the piano: Insónia and Walden Pond’s Monk. In between those and this new release, Tiago has been working in the original soundtrack for Portuguese short movie Bibliografia.
Samsara was recorded in Lisbon at Namouche Estudio by Joaquim Monte and mastered in Berlin at D&M by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich.